Cloudflare has expanded its Startup Plan, the free program it piloted last year with a small group of early-stage companies. The pilot offered products chosen for their leverage in early product development, including Workers, Stream, and Zero Trust.
Two categories of feedback drove the revision. Founders asked repeatedly for products outside the original bundle — Workers KV, Pages, Cloudflare for SaaS, R2, and Argo among them — and companies outside any accelerator program asked to be let onto the plan. Version 2.0 addresses both: the product basket is wider, and the eligibility criteria are broader.
What changed in the product bundle
The expanded product set makes Startup Plan v2.0 worth four times the original program's value. The table below compares v1.0 and v2.0 lineups.
| Product** | Description | v1.0 | v2.0* |
|---|---|---|---|
| Content Delivery Network (CDN) | Cloudflare's CDN is a distributed network of servers that provides several advantages for a website. By caching website content, Cloudflare helps improve page load speeds, reduce bandwidth usage, and reduce CPU usage on the server. | ✓ |
✓ |
| Web Application Firewall (WAF) | Cloudflare WAF protects a customer’s Internet properties from common vulnerabilities like SQL injection attacks, cross-site scripting, and cross-site forgery requests, with no changes to its existing infrastructure. | ✓ |
✓ |
| DNS | Cloudflare DNS is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers the fastest response time, unparalleled redundancy, and advanced security with built-in DDoS mitigation and DNSSEC. | ✓ |
✓ |
| Advanced DDoS Protection | Cloudflare DDoS protection secures websites, applications, and entire networks while ensuring the performance of legitimate traffic is not compromised. | ✓ |
✓ |
| Page Rules | Page Rules allows you to conditionally change zone settings such as security level or rocket loader settings. It is also how cache settings are configured for traffic passing through the zone. | ✓ |
✓ |
| Workers | Cloudflare Workers allows developers to augment existing applications or create entirely new ones through a lightweight execution environment without configuring or maintaining infrastructure. | ✓ |
✓ |
| Stream | Cloudflare Stream provides out-of-the-box video infrastructure that handles storage, encoding, and delivery. Using the Stream API, customers can build video functionality affordably and with minimal engineering effort. | ✓ |
✓ |
| Zero Trust | Cloudflare Zero Trust replaces legacy security perimeters with our global edge, making the Internet faster and safer for teams around the world. | ✓ |
✓ |
| R2 | Cloudflare R2 Storage allows developers to store large amounts of unstructured data without the costly egress bandwidth fees associated with typical cloud storage services. | ✓ |
|
| Pages | Cloudflare Pages allows frontend developers to quickly and easily build, collaborate on, and deploy websites. | ✓ |
|
| Workers KV | Workers KV is a global, low-latency, key-value data store. It supports high read volumes with low-latency, making it possible to build highly dynamic APIs and websites which respond as quickly as a cached static file would. | ✓ |
|
| Workers Unbound | Workers Unbound is a serverless platform for compute-intensive workloads, supporting up to 30s CPU time (GA), and 15 minute cron triggers (beta). | ✓ |
|
| Cloudflare for SaaS | Offers the benefits of Cloudflare’s SSL management to SaaS company’s customers. Allows SaaS customers to use their custom vanity domains while maintaining a branded customer experience, improved SEO rankings, and all the perks of dedicated certificates. | ✓ |
|
| Advanced Certificate Manager (ACM) | Advanced Certificate Manager is a flexible and customizable way to issue and manage certificates in Cloudflare. Customers use Advanced Certificate Manager when they want something more customizable than Universal SSL but still want the convenience of SSL certificate issuance and renewal. | ✓ |
|
| Image Resizing | Resize images for a variety of device types and connections from a single-source master image. Images can be manipulated by dimensions, compression ratios, and format (WebP conversion where supported). It is a feature of Speed→Optimization on the Dashboard. | ✓ |
|
| Images | Cloudflare Images lets you set up an image pipeline in minutes. Build a scalable image pipeline to store, resize, optimize and deliver images in a fast and secure manner. | ✓ |
|
| Argo Smart Routing | Argo Smart Routing improves Internet performance by intelligently routing end users through less congested and more reliable paths over the Internet using our network. | ✓ |
|
| Spectrum | DDoS protection, firewalling features and performance benefits for any TCP or UDP based application (such as gaming, FTP, email etc.) | ✓ |
|
| Load Balancing | Improve application performance and availability by steering traffic away from unhealthy origin servers and dynamically distributing it to the most available and responsive server pools. | ✓ |
|
| Rate Limiting | Protect your site or API from malicious traffic by blocking client IP addresses that hit a URL pattern and exceed a threshold you define. | ✓ |
|
| Waiting Room | Cloudflare Waiting Room allows organizations to route excess users to a custom-branded waiting room, helping preserve customer experience and protect origin servers from being overwhelmed with requests. | ✓ |
|
| Area 1 Email Security | Comprehensive email security solution to eliminate the risk from phishing, which is the root cause of damage in 95% of all cybersecurity incidents. Configuration with Google and Microsoft in 5 minutes. | ✓ |
Two footnotes qualify the table. Product-specific usage limits apply to the included products. The listed products and the enablement video training are also part of the plan, but certain products carry enough setup complexity that enterprise customers typically buy a separate onboarding support package; that package is not included, though it can be purchased. The products that most often need it are Aegis, Custom Tiered Cache, Argo Tunnels for Load Balancers, Magic Transit (adding and removing subnets), BYOIP / static IP, Dedicated Gateway IP, and FedRAMP Setup.
Participants also get a piece of Cloudflare's beta pipeline: when new products enter beta, startups on the plan can share their use case and potentially receive early access.
Who qualifies
The baseline requirements are unchanged in spirit but now apply to a wider field. A startup must be early stage — defined as having raised less than $3 million — and enrolled in or recently graduated from a participating accelerator program.
Founders in a participating program reach the plan through their program's vendor perk page, which points to the Startup Plan landing page; there they select their program from a list. If a program is missing from that list, an email to [email protected] with the perk manager's details will start the process on Cloudflare's side.
Three new routes in
Beyond accelerator enrollment, Cloudflare has opened the program to three additional groups:
- Workers Launchpad funding program. Startups building on Cloudflare Workers can apply to the funding program as well, which brings introductions to leading investors, additional mentorship, and other perks.
- Referral Program. The Select Accelerator dropdown on the landing page now includes a "Referred by (include details in comments)" option. Entering the email address of a Cloudflare contact in the comments field triggers an account upgrade once that contact validates the referral.
- Alumni Program. "Cloudflare Alumni" is likewise now an option in the Select Accelerator dropdown, covering founders who have worked at Cloudflare or have ties to its teams through the community or prior employment.
Upgrades for existing v1.0 participants
Startups already on the plan do not need to act. The additional products will land in their accounts automatically over the coming weeks, and the upgrade remains in effect for the rest of the year their company is on the plan. Questions about getting the most out of a plan go to [email protected]; general program questions go to [email protected].
